Health and Fitness

Occasionally it will occur to me—usually after flipping down the tab of a chilled can of diet soda beverage—that I haven’t had a glass of water in upwards of two weeks. By my watch, my current personal drought has only lasted around 65 hours. I’m quite confident that the last time I intentionally consumed plain water was early Tuesday morning, after waking up from an evening frought with Miller Lite and Jell-O shots, and stumbled into the kitchen in search of a cold and hydrating concoction. Fortunately, sometime last October I had had the foresight to fill an old orange juice jug with water and store it in the fridge.

I know what you’re thinking, “What’d you do with the orange juice?” Well, after it went bad, I poured some of it into the cactus pots and the rest down the drain before de-oranging the container, filling it with water and loading it into the fridge somewhere amongst the mass of soda and beer cans. For a certain portion of this winter, I actually assumed the jug was empty, but could think of no better place to store it, particularly because the recycling bin was always full and I’m not about to carry that shit out on a more than monthly basis. At any rate, upon realizing that I’ve unintentionally parched myself, there is usually little else I can do besides guzzle my soda and move on with my day, which usually includes a few more sodas, at least one bag of chips, and most of a pack of cigarettes.

I am a creature of bad habit and healthy living is not my forte. Still, everyone goes through phases.

My one and only lifetime health kick occurred in the midst of my two-year stint in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if it was the weather or the incredibly strong “organic” pot from the northern portion of the state, but something kicked me into gear. Within two months I was as thin as I had been since freshman year of college—when a combination of unbearable homesickness/depression and laxative laced soda in the university cafeteria kept my density to a minimum. However, as it turns out, my new “healthy lifestyle” was more akin to life in a crackhouse, than anything that might appear in Shape magazine or on Oprah’s stupid, fucking “Being Your Best Self” series.

One time I was having dinner with two girlfriends. Neither ate anything substantial, ever, both were masochistic gym rats. “I hate when I get hit on at the gym,” Dumb Whore said to Emotionally Unstable. “I’ve never been hit on at the gym,” she woefully responded before they both looked at me for the tie-breaker. At that moment I had a choice. By agreeing that I too “hate getting hit on at the gym,” I would be knowingly, albeit indirectly, suggesting that Emotionally Unstable was perhaps not attractive enough to be hit on at the gym, and therefore ugly and fat. On the other hand, if I were to say I had never been hit on at the gym, I would not only be suggesting that I was less attractive than Dumb Whore, but also boosting her already inflated ego.

I decided to go with the truth. “I’ve never been to a gym.” During my stint in L.A. however, I hit the gym, hard. I went one time over the course of one week, and I never returned. The visit occurred early on during my six-week healthy living program, a regiment that I designed myself, without the help of a medical professional, In Touch Weekly or Kirstie fuckin Alley. I simply eliminated what I believed to be unhealthy. This laundry list of my favorite things included, but was not limited to: cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, refined sugar, gluten and dairy.

In the beginning, things were going swimmingly. I was losing weight faster than I had predicted, and feeling more energetic than ever. Then I went to the gym. The treadmill was the only piece of machinery that I recognized offhand, so I hopped on, picked a pace and began running. Now although this is an activity that I hadn’t participated in since somewhere around 1999, I was still acutely aware of the intensity of its punishing properties. Heavy breathing, sore legs and heart palpitations I was expecting—blurred vision, numbness of extremities and teeth grinding were not. After a mile (it’s not that unbelievable, I blacked out for part of it) I shut down that fuckin spinning rubber and laid down outside. Perhaps these were endorphins, and maybe since I provide myself with copious amounts of them chemically, the natural ones just don’t cut it anymore. Or maayybee, I rocked my heart rate up to about 200 bpm with a goddamned nicotine patch adhered to my upper arm. Essentially I had consumed the amount of nicotine in 12 cigarettes in roughly three minutes longer than it takes a healthy adult to run a mile.

Still, I’m sure if I wouldn’t have hustled out of the Y that day to lie down, someone would have totally hit on me.

Fast-forward one month. It’s mid-August, I’ve stayed on my diet and I’m looking pretty thin (ya know, for an “athletic” build). All it took was a weekend trip to Kentucky though, to blow my health plan right out of the water. Upon arriving in the upper South I quickly noticed the lack of “No Smoking” signs and felt the need to take full advantage. By the end up my trip I was at ten cigarettes a day, and back to binge drinking, but at this weight, I was in no position to give up completely. I returned to Los Angeles, slapped on a patch and went about my business.

Three weeks later, I was still absorbing 14 mg of nicotine transdermally, while simultaneously inhaling in the neighborhood of 15 cigarettes per day. Needless to say, in conjunction with that level of nicotine, little more than a few cases of Diet Coke per week were necessary to sustain my life. And due to the astronomical amount of stimulants circulating throughout my nervous system, my health and behavior began to more closely resemble that of a crystal meth addict than a health nut. Also, beta-blockers became necessary to control the shaking. . .

Which brings me to the almost present. A bulletin board in my mother’s laundry room features upcoming event notes as well as semi-recent pictures. One photo is of my sister and me in Los Angeles, late August 2007. I’m sporting a lovely strapless summer dress (the pot MUST have been good, upper arms of that magnitude should never be prominently featured) and I think to myself how much smaller I looked. Before I could feel too good about it though, my mother interjected with a backhanded compliment, “You looked really good, then.” Now this comment begs the retort, “So what, I don’t look good now,” which I tried soo hard to abstain from uttering, but what other method did I have of admitting, “I know, right?”